Category: Robotics

Audio feedback from your robot

Intro

After our previous post where Bence explained that roboticists should be careful doing scary stuff with their robot, I thought I need to do some with mine to troll ourselves. So why shouldn’t my robot sound like this when it is moving:

Seriously. Don’t we have enough people already freaking out due to the recent years’ military adoption of drone technology?

Your work is good. Amazing. The best animated dolls ever. You have more experience in robotics than I do. But this is not the way to present your work, no matter what! The shortest line that can be misunderstood when cut in the proper way will be the one circulated around. The joke was awkward even for a roboticist.

For a few minutes of fame you just made yourself and the rest of us look like irresponsible crazy scientists. It doesn’t even do you good as you scared so many people and fuelled endless conspiracy/robot-takeover/singularity theories that tips the acceptance of robots all the way to the negative scale.

We should be concentrating on making people’s lives easier, safer, more meaningful, more pleasant, whatever that is for good, not freaking them out with human-looking dolls talking BS!

Then there are already some famous & smart people who are half-educated on recent AI/Robotics talk fearful nonsense, such as Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and others. Do you want to join that club?

A certainly controversial figure coming from evolutionary biology. He is known for his anti-religious public appearances and publications.

What he is less known for inventing the word meme. It comes from his book “The selfish gene” and stands for a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene. From an evolutionary point of view a meme has the same attributes: reproduction, selfishness and natural selection.

In this book he methodically goes through a handful of ideas and puts them in parallel with evolution. I found it a nice mental exercise.

Let me quote his take on explaining ball games for the roboticists around here.

“When a man throws a ball high in the air and catches it again. he behaves as if he had solved a set of differential equations in predicting the trajectory of the ball… at some subconscious level, something functionally equivalent to the mathematical calculations is going on.”

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And for the sake of completeness, I’m also presenting some of his anti-religious quotes. Be advised, they may make sense!

“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”

“Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.”

In particular, it resonates with the sciences that take living beings, including humans, as their research objects. We can however immediately underline an essential difference: the roboticist has to make robots; the neurophysiologist, the bio-mechanical engineer or the psycho-physicist seeks to understand humans and animals. Words have their significance. The missions differ: while the former have to do, and are condemned to innovating, the latter have to understand, and are condemned to producing knowledge.